– his family when he came out and how he couldn’t look them in the eyes because he felt so guilty. He was really soft. That’s why he kept away from Belfast for so long; he couldn’t get past it. He wanted to go home but he couldn’t. And especially his mother – when he looked her in the eye. He was emotionally wounded.14
The extent of this emotional wounding was made apparent in a report compiled by Barry Walle, a counsellor and psychotherapist, to whom Conlon had been referred by senior house officer Dr Joanna Bromley and consultant psychiatrist Dr Geoff Tomlinson in 2000:
Gerry can be described as split: three parts adapted to prison, one part outside. His internal world is almost entirely taken up by vivid and detailed ‘memories’ of his arrest, interrogation/torture, conviction, and prison, so vivid that he is, in effect, reliving it. It is his reality for most of the time without the benefit of the support and companionship of fellow prisoners. Gerry’s behaviour is further confused and complicated because there are no real walls. He often wishes he was back in there because then the way he feels would make sense; he would fit.15
Conlon’s external world was almost as confused, convoluted and perhaps as frightening as his internal one. He had to adjust to a society in which he was viewed as both a lion and a jackal:
My trouble now is that half the people I meet think I’m some sort of hero, which I’m not, and the other half think I’m a terrorist, which I never was. I go to pubs and clubs, and in lavatories everyone wants to shake my hands, and I don’t know where their hands have been. I went to Glasgow for a Celtic-Rangers match and people I never knew were taking off their wedding rings and giving them to me.16
To complicate matters, the Guildford Four were still the targets of attacks from the British judiciary. In a pre-retirement BBC television interview, the Recorder of London and the Old Bailey’s most senior judge, Sir James Miskin QC – the same judge who had said that the release of the Guildford Four was ‘mad’ – offered the ludicrous theory that the IRA could have bribed some young and hard-up policeman to ‘cook up’ certain documents to help free the Guildford Four. It mattered little to Sir James that, other than within the confines of his fertile imagination, there was no evidence of the existence of any such young and hard-up policeman. The possibility was there, and presumably, that would have been enough for him, had he been on the bench of the appeal court on 19 October 1989, to send the Guildford Four back to prison. The same man was no stranger to controversy: at a speech at a Mansion House dinner in London in March 1988, he told a ‘joke’ about ‘nig-nogs’ and said that he was engaged in a trial against ‘murderous Sikhs’ (one of whom he later sentenced to 30 years’ imprisonment for murder).
A barrister, and Fianna Fáil member of the Irish parliament, David Andrews, said of Sir James’s comments that he was ‘very concerned that a mind like that can preside over a judicial system in any democracy. I feel a great sense of relief that Sir James is no longer in a position to adjudge cases.’ Andrews went on to say that the comments were ‘so right wing as to be almost fascist.’17 Gerry Conlon said that the judge’s critique was part of an ongoing ‘whispering campaign’ by the British judiciary against the Guildford Four. ‘This has put our safety in jeopardy,’ Conlon said. ‘I would think that any kind of crazy character in this country could believe what Sir James Miskin has said, and, therefore, want to attack us, physically.’18 Arguably, it was not in Sir James’s nature to apologise for anything – certainly not to anyone he perceived to be an Irish terrorist – and he unwisely refused to express regret for his outlandish remarks. But nature and wisdom sometimes make incompatible bedfellows and, as the eminent eighteenth-century Irish parliamentarian, Edmund Burke, once put it, ‘Never, no never, did nature say one thing and wisdom say another.’19
Despite the high-velocity pace of his life, Gerry Conlon did his best to enjoy his freedom. He was not shy and never lacked the confidence to walk up to a woman and strike up a conversation, with the intention of bringing her home to his bed. Nor was he one of those crusading bores who talked about nothing but the good causes that consumed his daily existence. When he was not ‘working’, he embraced life with the passion of one who felt that he had been denied it for too long. One of his many girlfriends was Dublin journalist Fiona Looney. She first met him six months after he was released from prison, though she didn’t get to know him until a year later. She remembers that Gerry and Paul Hill were ‘quite the rock stars’ in Dublin in the months following their release.
I think I first met him in The Pink Elephant nightclub in Dublin after an RTÉ Late, Late Show, but I really just shook his hand and wished him well. For what it’s worth, I thought he was as sexy as fuck! I had known Marion, Shane, Vicky, Siobhan, Louise Neville, and all The Pogues crowd for a few years, and I met Gerry through them. I spent some time with him over the course of a few months, but I wouldn’t describe our relationship as a romance. He was a charmer, but there was also an innocence about him which I found really touching. When I knew him, he was incredibly forgiving and lacking in bitterness over what had happened to him. I was amazed at that – he honestly didn’t seem to bear anyone ill will. On the other hand, he was like a child in a candy shop – and he helped himself to an awful lot of candy. He slept with dozens of women in the first couple of years after he was released and, like an adolescent teenager, he kept count. I think the count was around one hundred and fifty-six, and he was hoping I’d be the one hundred and fifty-seventh. Most women would be offended by that, but I thought it was funny and endearing. I remember him telling me how grateful he was to the IRA for taking him under their wing in prison; he reckoned it was the only thing that prevented him from being raped.20
Conlon started smoking marijuana at the age of sixteen and had sustained the habit in and out of prison. Occasionally he snorted cocaine and took ecstasy tablets, usually at a party or a rock concert. Frank Murray, the manager of The Pogues, has vivid memories of himself and Conlon hanging around together in Camden Town at the start of 1990: ‘He was full-on, you know? Anything that he couldn’t do in there [in prison], he was trying to do out here; he was trying to live the sixties, the seventies, and the eighties, all in one month. As a friend, it was very hard to go to Gerry and say, “Look, I think you’re overdoing it a bit” because he’d been in jail for fifteen years and he felt he had the right and it was like, “Nobody’s gonna tell me what to do.”’21
On 29 August 1990, Kenneth Baker, the British Home Secretary, referred the Birmingham Six case back to the appeal court, on the basis of further fresh evidence becoming available. In this instance, the fresh evidence was of a forensic nature, which called into question the veracity of tests carried out by Home Office forensic scientist Dr Frank Skuse, whose original examinations indicated that, when arrested, four of the six prisoners had nitroglycerine on their clothing. It was the end of an era for Gerry and all those who had campaigned for this day. It was a victory, but even in victory there sometimes lurks the aura of defeat. At a stroke, gone was the raison d’être for Conlon’s post-prison existence. The campaign was over, at least until the appeal was heard. What to do?
Tens of thousands of pounds in compensation was being sent to Conlon by the British government, and he spent it as if there was no tomorrow. The working-class lad from Belfast now had enough money to indulge practically any flight of fancy that engaged his imagination: an idyllic situation, many would say, but, for the emotionally disturbed Conlon, being given a pot of gold was the equivalent of an alcoholic being handed the keys of a bar and being told to lock the doors behind him on his way home.
Cut adrift from the cause that had consumed his life since he had come out of prison, Conlon now had time to seek a fair wind, and on his journey he found plenty of fair-weather friends. He wanted to fit in, to claw back those lost years, to be ‘like the same fella I was when I went in’. He frequented Irish bars, chased women and generally tried his best to have a good time in the company of lads who reminded him of his own youth.
It was an impossible situation. For a start, I had money and they were all on the sites or else on the dole, and I felt guilty as hell about that. I’d buy everything, all
